Palin's Home Town Expresses Surprise, Shock at Selection

"It's big, but it's small. Everybody knows everybody," a local said of Wasilla, Alaska, where Gov. Sarah Palin grew up and still lives. (By Al Grillo -- Associated Press)

"I would've thought that McCain would go for someone more experienced, someone who had been in and out of the country. It was a shock," said Lewis, 52, raising his voice to be heard over the chain saw carving a likeness of a grizzly bear out of block of wood at the Alaska State Fair in nearby Palmer.

Sawdust drifting into his salt-and-pepper beard, Lewis added: "She seems like she cares about the common-law man. I feel like she cares about me."

A few stalls away, past the I Did A Putt miniature golf course, Korey Cronquist paused from polishing a jet black Ski-Doo snowmobile. Through his company's Wasilla dealership, and moving in the racing circles with Todd, he has spent a fair amount of time with the Palins.

"I know her character, and I know she has integrity," Cronquist, 38, said of the governor. "She's driven, motivated. She's a strong person. And because of all that, I knew she wasn't going to stop with our little town."

Palin's primary residence remains in Wasilla. When the legislature is in session, she decamps to the governor's mansion in Juneau. The rest of the time, she commutes to an office in Anchorage decorated by a grizzly bear skin and a enormous king crab, often stopping along the way at the Mocha Moose to order a skinny white caffe latte.

As mayor from 1996 to 2002, Palin encouraged development in Wasilla -- where a new Target and other big-box retailers line the highway -- by slashing property taxes, residents say. Then she pushed for a sales tax, arguing it was the fairest way to raise revenue in a town that has about 7,000 residents but that serves a valley population 10 times as large.

"If you went to city council meetings -- and I went to a lot of them -- she didn't make a quick decision," said Bruce Nicholson, who owns a local concrete grinding and polishing businesses. "She took it under advisement. She thought things out."

But Palin also showed nerve, he said. Her resolve in standing up to oil companies in the legislature, which voted to increase taxes on the firms, was presaged by her effort to build a trail between Wasilla's lakes.

"Rather than bending to the old folks -- the people who were the status quo, the people who'd made decisions for years -- she did what was in the best interests of the people," he said. "She's not part of a political machine."

That reputation for independence has defined Palin in Alaska far more than her stance on socially conservative issues that made her selection so popular with the national GOP base. In Alaska, an abortion-opposing, pro-gun politician is, in many ways, simply a politician, and it is unusual to find a resident who is against drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But in a political establishment badly tainted by oil money, Palin stood out vividly.

In high school, "she was just a person you admire," said Susan DeCamp, 41, who was a freshman when Palin (then Sarah Heath) was a senior in Wasilla, where her father taught science. But when she made the move to state politics, it was as a member of the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. On the way to forcing out a fellow member who was chairman of the state Republican Party, because of a conflict of interest, she resigned herself after 11 months on the job, leaving a salary exceeding $100,000 in the name of integrity.

Palin's decision served her well when the federal investigation of Alaska politics burst into public view in 2006, just as she was running for governor. The candidate cruised into office by dovetailing demands for open government with professions of love for Alaska. She began her term with public approval ratings in the 90s.

Less than two years later, Palin can boast several victories in the legislature, including a bill to create a pipeline that would ship Alaska's currently untapped natural gas to the Lower 48 states. But she has also caught her first whiff of scandal. Lawmakers appointed a special prosecutor to investigate whether Palin or her staff improperly pushed to have fired a state trooper who went through an ugly divorce from Palin's sister.

"This is a new arena she's got invited into," said Ralph Moore, 57, a Wasilla laborer. "It'll be interesting to see how much she learns between now and then, how much they teach her.

"They say she's a quick study, because no one thought she was ready to be governor."